Keep Horizon Europe project communication organised and connected to your project activities
Email remains one of the primary communication channels in Horizon Europe projects.
Consortium coordinators exchange hundreds of emails every month with beneficiaries, the European Commission, project officers, reviewers and external stakeholders. Invitations, meeting minutes, deliverables, financial requests and technical discussions often live exclusively in email inboxes.
By integrating Grant Planner with Microsoft Outlook, project teams can continue using their familiar email client while keeping project communication connected to the relevant activities inside Grant Planner.
Why Combine Grant Planner and Outlook?
Grant Planner manages the operational side of your Horizon Europe project.
Outlook manages day-to-day communication.
Together, they help project teams avoid one of the most common problems in collaborative projects: important project information becoming buried inside personal email inboxes.
Instead of searching through thousands of emails, users can associate conversations with specific work packages, tasks, deliverables or milestones.
Keep Project Discussions Organised
Every Horizon Europe project generates continuous communication.
Examples include:
- Deliverable reviews
- Consortium discussions
- Meeting invitations
- Technical questions
- Budget clarifications
- Reviewer requests
- European Commission communications
By combining Grant Planner with Outlook, these exchanges remain linked to the project activities they concern instead of becoming isolated email threads.
Continue Using Your Existing Email Workflow
Most organisations already rely on Outlook as their primary email client.
An integration with Grant Planner allows users to continue working with familiar tools while benefiting from dedicated Horizon Europe project management.
There is no need to change communication habits or introduce another messaging platform.
Better Traceability
Project decisions are often made by email.
Connecting Outlook with Grant Planner makes it easier to preserve the context behind those decisions by associating important conversations with the relevant project components.
This improves transparency, knowledge transfer and continuity when project staff change during a multi-year Horizon Europe project.
Reduce Information Silos
One of the biggest risks in collaborative projects is that critical information remains accessible only to the recipient of an email.
By connecting Outlook with Grant Planner, important exchanges can be referenced alongside the relevant project activities, reducing dependency on individual inboxes and making project knowledge easier to share across the consortium.
Ideal Use Cases
The Grant Planner and Outlook integration is particularly useful for:
- Horizon Europe coordinators
- Project Management Offices (PMOs)
- Universities
- Research organisations
- Innovation consultancies
- Large international consortia
Any organisation managing extensive email communication alongside collaborative projects can benefit from this integration.
Benefits at a Glance
By combining Grant Planner with Outlook, your organisation can:
- Continue using your existing email workflow.
- Connect project communication to work packages and deliverables.
- Improve traceability of project decisions.
- Reduce information silos.
- Keep project communication organised throughout the project lifecycle.
- Increase continuity when team members change.
Digital Sovereignty Considerations
Microsoft Outlook is one of the world's leading email platforms and is deeply integrated into Microsoft 365.
However, it remains part of a non-European software ecosystem.
For many Horizon Europe beneficiaries, particularly universities, public organisations and publicly funded research institutes, digital sovereignty is becoming an increasingly important consideration alongside security and compliance.
Organisations seeking greater control over their digital infrastructure may therefore wish to evaluate European alternatives for collaboration and communication.
Looking for a More Sovereign Alternative?
If digital sovereignty is one of your organisation's priorities, it may be worth evaluating a European alternative to Microsoft Outlook.
Solutions such as Open-Xchange (OX App Suite) or Kopano, both developed in Europe, provide enterprise email and collaboration capabilities while giving organisations greater control over where their data is stored and processed. For institutions already pursuing a European digital strategy, these solutions can significantly reduce dependence on non-European cloud providers.
Of course, many universities, research organisations and public institutions have central IT departments that standardise email services across the entire organisation. Individual project teams may therefore have little influence over the choice of email platform.
Even so, discussing these alternatives with your IT department costs nothing. As digital sovereignty becomes an increasingly important topic within European research, your institution may already be evaluating—or planning to evaluate—European collaboration solutions as part of its long-term digital strategy.
Whatever email platform your organisation uses, Grant Planner remains independent of the underlying mail provider, allowing you to manage Horizon Europe projects without locking your project management processes into a particular software ecosystem.